Music

Saturday, August 05, 2017

“All the films in this book share an air of disreputability…
I have tried to avoid using the word art
about the movies in this book, not just because I didn’t want to inflate my
claims for them, but because the word is used far too often to shut down
discussion rather than open it up. If something has been acclaimed as art, it’s
not just beyond criticism but often seen as above the mere mortals for whom its
presumably been made. It’s a sealed artifact that offers no way in. It is as
much a lie to claim we can be moved only by what has been given the imprimatur
of art as it would be to deny that there are, in these scruffy movies, the very
things we expect from art: avenues into human emotion and psychology, or into
the character and texture of the time the films were made, or avenues into the
context of our own time.” -- Charles
Taylor, Opening Wednesday at a Theater or
Drive-in Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ‘70s

**********************************

The esteemed and influential film critic Pauline Kael once
wrote that great films are rarely perfect films, a statement that seems, at
least to these ears, to be close to inarguable. It’s the inconsistency and ego
and countless concessions to the practical reality of filmmaking-- in other
words, the human touch-- that accounts for the warts and wobbles contained
within even the best films from any era. And in an age when perfection seems
measured by the level of slickness and empty spectacle attainable through
saturated levels of computer-generated intervention, the opposite is most
certainly also true.

Kael’s statement, and her estimable spirit as a critic whose
work prioritized the detailed evocation of what was on screen—the emotion (hers
and the film’s), the contradictions, the sense of life, or lack thereof-- as
essential elements in assessing and conveying the experience of a given work,
hews close to the heart of film and social critic Charles Taylor’s new
collection of essays, Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-in
Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ‘70s.(Taylor notes that the
book’s title references the preferred release pattern of the time for genre
pictures—horror pictures, biker sagas, moonshine melodramas, and even phony
documentaries like In Search of Noah’s Ark
and Chariots of the Gods?—a mid-week
jump on the weekend markets and a quick getaway out of town before anyone detected
the stench. But where I grew up in Southern Oregon, the “Opens Wednesday”
pattern held for whatever the quality of the release and only began to move
toward the now-standard Friday release date in the wake of Star Wars and the move toward the new era of empty blockbusters
that would take hold by the end of the decade.)

For Taylor, and much of his audience, the period charted
from 1970 to 1977 represents the last sustained period of great filmmaking in
American movies. But Taylor’s mission here is not an empty celebration of the
cheesiness of the era a la an amusing tome like The Stewardess is Flying the Plane! Nor is it to craft yet another
tribute to the classics of the era which, as he correctly observes in the
book’s foreword (entitled “Prevues of Coming Attractions”), have already been
covered eloquently by critics lucky enough to have been writing about film at
the time, to say nothing of the volumes of ones and zeroes devoted to them
since the advent of Internet film writing. As Taylor writes of his collection,
“The focus here is on some of the movies that slipped in to the background
while those pictures dominated the foreground,” the shadow cinema created by
the looming presence of those classics so often celebrated in full sunlight.

So instead of The Wild
Bunch, The Godfather Part II, Chinatown or Mean Streets, Taylor leads off his volume of 13 essays
(encompassing 15 separate films and a generous spillover of social context to
ground his observations) with Michael Ritchie’s relatively forgotten crime gem Prime Cut (1972), followed in quick
succession by vital and perceptive essays on Vanishing Point (1971), Cisco
Pike (1972) and Hickey and Boggs
(1972). What’s remarkable right off the top about Taylor’s arguments is how
deftly he avoids crossing over the thin line separating observational
appreciation and superlative-saturated overstatement in making his case for the
films he’s chosen to write about. We live in an Internet era when everyone,
talented writers as well as the very untalented ones, is scrambling to stake a
claim for X, Y or Z (but not, perhaps, X, Y and Zee) as the latest
undiscovered masterpiece—it’s a trap I’ve fallen into myself on more than one
occasion, borne not from lack of enthusiasm but lack of proper control.

But with one notable exception, a passionate argument for
the virtues of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me
the Head of Alfredo Garcia, the Peckinpah film that more than any other
divides the director’s acolytes and fuels the derision of his detractors, that
isn’t the game Taylor is playing. He isn’t interested in trying to convince the
reader that, say, Coffy (1973) or Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) are necessarily
great American films, as great American films are typically defined, or
categorized, or sealed off as art from any dissenting opinions of them as such.
Rather, what interests him is the blood, fury, electricity and even mournful resignation that can be found coursing through
many of these movies. Among the many results is perhaps the most illuminating
chapter on not only Pam Grier (“One of those rare performers, like Ava Gardner
or Angelina Jolie,” Taylor writes in the essay’s opening paragraph, “who seem
to command the camera, and the adoration of the viewer, by natural right”) but
the social phenomenon of the “Blaxploitation” film in general that I’ve ever
read; or the thrilling chapter on director Irvin Kirschner’s Laura Mars that deftly connects the
movie’s world of high fashion and low sleaze with the concurrent urban decay of
mid-‘70s New York City-- “Fear City” as it had been described—evoked so
viscerally by the Rolling Stones’ “Shattered” and the whole of their masterful Some Girls album. (I don’t even like Eyes of Laura Mars that much, and yet
after reading Taylor’s superb argument I was practically salivating to get
hands, and my eyes, on it.)

Taylor’s writing in Opening
Wednesday is tasty, sharp, provocative, open-eyed and often thrilling—this
is the sort of volume that, at the end of each new consideration, will compel
you to put the book down and immediately seek out the movie you’ve just
finished reading about, wherever you can find it. But you won’t, because the
impulse to continue, to see for yourself the way Taylor digests these second-tier,
sometimes disreputable, often simply ignored but undeniably vital American
works, is irresistible. And if you’re like me, you will start keeping a list of
titles to submit that Taylor, if there’s any justice left in the world, might
include in his next volume. (My own list might include something like John
Flynn’s The Outfit, Richard
Fleischer’s Mandingo, and the one
movie I really wish Taylor had found room for in this book, Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls-- it was Taylor's own writing on the film in 2004 that really opened up my receptors to
the true worth of that film, which I maintain is one of, if not the best movie Verhoeven has made to
date.)

Another fine film writer, Justin Chang, chief film critic
for the Los Angeles Times, was on
hand to talk with Taylor onstage Friday night after a screening of Prime Cut, the introductory evening in a
series of films based on the book curated by Taylor through the UCLA Film and
Television Archive which will run through August 26 at the Billy Wilder Theater
inside the Hammer Museum in Westwood. After the screening, Taylor engaged with Prime Cut’s status as a political
satire, both as a product of its time-- the film’s Midwestern setting is used
to illustrate with chilling clarity, and without pushing the most obvious
buttons of condescension, the disparity between Nixon’s silent majority and the
reality of the world surrounding that insulated community—and as an unnerving
echo from that time into our current disorientation and division during the
trials and tribulations of Trump. He also talked passionately about Kael,
railing against the sexism inherent in the oft-leveled charges against her as
an intimidating tyrant who demanded blind allegiance from her friends and
admirers and who would not tolerate variance from the opinions and arguments
she set down in print. (“There are currently lots of men writing about all the
same movies who all have the same general opinions,” he argued to Chang, “yet
no one ever says the sort of things about them that have been said about
Pauline Kael or other female film critics.”)

Finally, when Chang asked if there
is currently even such a thing as a “shadow cinema” in an age when even the blockbusters
which rule the multiplexes enjoy ever-shrinking theatrical windows on their way
to perpetuity as streaming product on Netflix and Amazon, Taylor provided
titles like Andrew Niccol’s In Time
(2011) and Scott Stewart’s sublimely unnerving Dark Skies (2013), both of which he also talks about briefly in Opening Wednesday, as more recent
examples of movies that have gotten lost in the stampede toward billion-dollar
global profits and the holy grail (or is it golden calf?) of Hollywood-- the
establishment of the franchise “universe.”

Taylor, as engaging a speaker as he is an impassioned
writer, will appear again with critic Kim Morgan on Saturday, August 5, to
introduce and then discuss Bring Me the
Head of Alfredo Garcia. (He’ll also be signing books starting at 6:30 pm
before the screening, as he did Friday night.) After that, the critic will
continue his swing through Los Angeles with appearances at a couple of great
Los Angeles bookstores—yes, we still have those places around these parts, ones
that don’t have the initials “B&N” even. Critic Amy Nicholson will
interview Taylor on Tuesday, August 8, 7:30 p.m. at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles.
Then, on Friday, August 11, West Hollywood’s Book Soup hosts Taylor when he will be interviewed by author and critic Steve
Erickson (Zeroville, Shadowbahn) at
7:30 p.m. It is this writer’s considered opinion that Taylor, in whatever
venue, should not be missed.

As for the film series based on Charles Taylor’s book Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-in Near You, I thought it would be best to leave you with a smidgen
of Taylor himself on each of the movies scheduled to play at the Billy Wilder
in August. Tickets for each program can be purchased by clicking on each title,
and each program is highly recommended by me. Here’s why.

Prime
Cut (1972): “Was there ever a movie tough guy as contained as Lee
Marvin? Long and slim, though with a cruel, meaty mouth, Marvin submerged all
the threat within himself. You could see that in the way he chose implied
menace over bluster, in the way he hid the snarl of his voice inside a purr…
Action heroes could be cold (Clint Eastwood) or stoic (Charles Bronson) or cool
(Steve McQueen). Marvin was something else, an action star who refined threat
in to something approaching elegance. In Prime
Cut he acts as if he’s privy to a joke no one else is in on. That’s what
makes him a perfect choice for a movie that submerges its satire in
action-movie mechanics. It may also have been what guaranteed that the
audiences in tune with the movie’s satirical vision would stay away, while the
ones targeted by it might be drawn in.”

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974; Saturday, August 5): “What links Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia to
the other films in this book, its disreputability, is what allowed critics to
dismiss it… The movie stints on none of the grime and sweat and stench of the
scramble for the title character’s head any more than John Huston stinted on
the grime and sweat and stench of the scramble for gold in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a movie that’s the spiritual
forerunner of this one… This is a movie about people who, like the aging
outlaws of The Wild Bunch, are
defeated before they begin. It would be easy to try and turn the fortunes of Alfredo Garcia into a story of the
triumphant emergence of a masterpiece by mentioning that its reputation has
begun—begun—to undergo a reversal.
Even a hint of triumph, though, seems all wrong for a movie haunted by the line
“Nobody loses all the time,” a movie where the only triumph is the triumph of
integrity, the kind that gets you killed.”

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971; Saturday, August 12): “In Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop we’re in a small-town
North Carolina service station at what appears to be about 6:00 a.m. on a rainy
Sunday morning. Maybe it’s Saturday. The characters themselves aren’t sure.
These hot-rodders have pulled into the station to attend to a busted carburetor
and it’s just as well the place is closed. The mood of this drizzling dawn
seeps into everything. Pretty soon they’ve drifted away from the task at hand
to nip on a bottle, doze, wander the town. One or two people are visible on the
street but something in the still, quiet air makes it feel like nothing’s about
to change. Saturday mornings in town give the promise of the bustle to come.
Sunday never shakes off its sleepiness. Whatever day it is, in Two-Lane Blacktop it’s always the rainy
Sunday morning that you just can’t shake.”

Vanishing Point (1971; Saturday, August
12): “Vanishing Point is a hot-rod
movie as tone poem, a picture about speed as a Zen state, for both the hero and
the audience. Vanishing Point wants
to get us off on pure movement, but that movement, shown in long shots
accompanied by the rev of the Challenger’s engine, stretches out time instead
of feeding our adrenaline. That is a very odd thing for a picture that must
have been sold to Twentieth Century-Fox as an exploitation movie that would
lure in not just the gearheads and action fans but the counterculture
moviegoers who had turned out for Easy
Rider... That the movie wasn’t what anyone would imagine from that
description may explain why Fox, which had no faith in it, released Vanishing Point via the neighborhood and
drive-in route—and why it must have confounded Fox when it became a hit. And It
is confounding. There’s no doubting
the movie’s cool, but nobody expects a drive-in movie to be meditative, or for
audiences to get excited about a meditative movie.”

Coffy (1973)andFoxy Brown (1974;
both Monday, August 14): “The confidence of Grier’s heroines doesn’t preclude
them from showing fear. On the contrary, bruised and sweating and giving rein
to the electric current of anger just below her skin, she’s a palpably human revenge machine. During the most
horrific acts she’s called on to perform—holding a sawed-off rifle on a dealer
as she forces him to inject a hot shot, going after a redneck’s eye with a hook
improvised from wire hangers—there’s an element of disgust mingled with rage
that gives Grier’s actions a jolt beyond standard exploitation-movie excess.”

Eyes of Laura Mars(1978; Friday, August 18) “‘Shattered’ moves with the
sloppy propulsion of someone who’s been through all New York City can throw at
you. Jagger’s vocal is a bruised shpritz, a prancing version of New Yorkers’
time-honored practice of bitching about just how bad the city has gotten. The
adrenaline-crash chorus behind him is sung in the cretinous voices of zombies
rising from the Manhattan streets. And still at the end of the song Jagger is
demanding more. Like many a transplant before him, he is still greedy for the
city’s energy, for its filth, for its scuzziness. And for Jagger, being a New
Yorker means boasting that you can take it.

The New York of Some Girls is the New York of Eyes of Laura Mars. Released just two months after the album. This Manhattan thriller is a celebration of sleaze as high chic. It mixes the sleekness of limos pulling up to the curb for an opening-night party with the smell of garbage awaiting pickup down at the corner. It’s like a swank gathering where the stylish guests have to step delicately around the corpses lying on the sidewalk on their way into the mansion. Actually, in the gala art exhibition that opens the movie, the corpses are inside.”

Hickey & Boggs(1972; Saturday, August 18): “Raymond Chandler had imbued
even the sleazy parts of Los Angeles with a sinister allure and Philip
Marlowe’s detective work with a quixotic romanticism. In Hickey & Boggs, L.A. looks on its last legs, the kind of
decaying city where the Greyhound station would be the brightest spot in town.
It’s a street-level view of the city, what you see driving or walking, not the
view from the high-rises springing up all over town. The partners’ office is
round the back of an ancient brick building next to the rear door of a shoe
store that doesn’t look as if anyone ever goes in. But no one ever seems to be
anywhere in this Los Angeles. This is a noir that takes place mostly in
daylight, and yet, from scene to scene, it feels almost as empty as any
nighttime street. All the locations are in run-down, nearly deserted parts of
the city, an elephant’s graveyard of urban life. By the time the movie climaxes
on a deserted stretch of beach, you barely notice the Pacific rolling in, and
the sun shining on what looks like the only clean air in the movie.”

Cisco Pike (1972; Saturday, August 26) “In some ways, Cisco Pike is a West Coast cousin to Donald Cammell and Nicolas
Roeg’s Performance (1968; released
1970), the movie in which Mick Jagger, as a reclusive, nearly forgotten rock
star hiding out in a decaying London mansion, confronts an East End gangster
played by James Fox. Cisco Pike
doesn’t have Performance’s maddening,
fragmented structure, its Borgesian illusion-and-reality games, or the sense of
decay so palpable that it feels as if, to borrow a line from Dylan, the carpet,
too, is crawling under you. But, like Performance,Cisco Pike is about a time and a
place that’s dead and hasn’t got the good sense to fall over.”

Aloha, Bobby and Rose (1975; Saturday, August 26) “At its heart this is a
movie about people who feel the pull of nostalgia before life has given them
anything to feel nostalgic about… Bobby and Rose live in hopes if the ephemeral
something better that may lie in their future but remains unrealized in their
present. The poignancy of the movie is that as their situation gets worse,
their hopes only get keener. Aloha, Bobby
and Rose opens in a romantic haze with Rose listening to her mother
reminisce about some dreamboat from her past. “Oh, honey,” she says, “you
shoulda seen Hollywood in the ‘40s.” It’s the same line used countless times on
young people being told what a mistake they made for being born when they were.
But here the voice itself seems to arrive from the past, maybe tuned in from
the same hazy station playing Artie Shaw & His Orchestra in the background
of the scene. It wavers slightly as if emanating from the ripples and the
fading that time has added to the black-and-white photos Rose’s mom is poring
over in her scrapbook. Or it could be that the faraway dreaminess of her voice
might just be brought on by her afternoon G & T…”

3 comments:

Just for the record, Wednesday openings were the norm back then, partly because smaller theatres would do split weeks (Wed-Sat, Sun-Tues). And STAR WARS itself opened on a Wednesday. The eventual switch to Friday openings was motivated by two things: The move to opening the entire country at once, which necessitated national TV buys, meaning that Thursdays became a better day for "Opens Tomorrow!", and the fact that as movies got worse, bad word-of-mouth from people seeing them on Wed. or Thurs. would depress the first weekend's numbers--suicide in an era where the long, slow build-up was no longer the way to do things.

Ever notice all the shots of power poles and telephone poles along the roads Kowalski navigates in Vanishing Point? Always brought to mind the ending of Spartacus and all the crucifixions along the road to Rome. And we all know what happened to Spartacus when he finally got to Rome, right? Right.

And I really liked Prime Cut, too, but, sorry, the former farmer in me just loses it every time the combine eats the car. THAT'S NOT HOW THAT WORKS! says I between fits of laughter. Takes me out of an otherwise fantastic flick.